The Ride

Day 16

Photo of the Day: Things Started Badly and Got Worse

Day sixteen

Today started badly. After an early night I awoke early and showed Jonny the courtesy/respect he deserves by locking the door to our bathroom. Sadly the lock threaded and I was trapped like the magnificent dolphin I am, in the functional tuna net the mediocre bathroom was. Eventually the fourth member of staff to attend the scene managed to free me.

With three hard days ahead, we eschewed the usual practice of making progress and went sand tobogganing instead. Shapotou Cultural Tourism Scenic Happy Place Economic Zone is a bit rubbish but it does have China's longest sand toboggan hill, which was great fun.

What wasn't great fun was fixing a puncture in the heat of the day and then heading off at 2pm instead of 8am.

It was also almost exclusively up-hill and really hard work. Yet by the end of the day we were camping with mountains to our south and the golden, rolling sand dunes of the Gobi desert to our north. It was more than worth the suffering.

We now also have a fourth team member, Cynthia, Tom's toy camel. As yet Cynthia does not have a bandanna.

Cool Fact: Bajiu and protein shakes don't mix well and your water bottle will retain the flavour of that particular cocktail forever.

April 22: Shapotou to Ganting - 61km

A Photo every Hour: Today's Highlight - Sand Tobogganing, of course.

Day 17

Photo Of The Day - Beer On The Move

Day seventeen.

It started well; the first 50km came easily as we worked together to beat the wind and pass into Gansu. A cycling career highlight for all of us was achieved when we each successfully took a beer from some delivery guys, whilst moving at a speed that will displease my maternal parent.

We had a great lunch thanks to Jonny picking a restaurant with sheep on the sign. Shaved bits of lamb and chunky noodles in a spicy sauce and a huge bowl of veg.

Then we hit the mountain. Mrs Google Maps missed this one. It punished us. Particular cruel on the tallest and strongest of us, Jonny. This cycling stuff about weight, power, aerodynamics? Turns out it's all true. There was also a lack of petrol stations, it wasn't long before anything remotely red became a mirage of one with promises of Oreos, water and warm fizzy drinks.

Things were even harder today as we all had stomach troubles of varying degrees. Weakened and punished I introduced my favoured method of pushing every so often to break the agony and eventually we made it to the top. To celebrate we drank one of the three beers that had been making the whole experience precisely 1.5 litres harder.

This was followed by a merciful 30km downhill, through mountains, watchtowers, some mud and sandstone Great Wall, mud brick villages; all with the Gobi in the distance. Our day was saved!

Until we ended up camping on a hybrid of graveyard and rubbish dump. I'll let you decide which of these we decided to be closer too. It was under the shadow of a watchtower and gigantic snow-capped mountains; but for me the presence of litter and the dead took the edge off.

April 23: Ganting to Dajingzhen - 107km

Photo Every Hour - Today's Highlight: The view

Day 18

Photo of the Day: It's at least this long

Day 18

Slapstick Friday. With no deisre to sleep with the dead and rubbish any longer than necessary we were gone by dawn. The shit hole we had been calling home for nine hours gave us one final send off; whilst we finally fixed Jonny's slow puncture, Tom peered over the bridge to see three rotting sheep carcasses and a dead dog. Is throwing dead animals off bridges the most fun thing to do here? I miss pristine Ningxia.

As we took part in the now customary change from pre-sunshine clothes to post-sunshine clothes a man tried to sell us 500g of bread for £5. Hilarious, but not nearly as funny as the next five hours of our most successful day to date.

First up was me, as we entered a ghost town, my reading age of five in Chinese saw me still reading the name of a shop as my front wheel hit a lump of concrete. Fortunately I was terrible at mountain biking as a teenager and flying over handle bars and rolling out of trouble came as second nature. Not a scratch on me and only a minor snap for one of my panniers.

Tom then asked if it was ok to drop rubbish into a bin without a bottom. Jonny and I assumed he meant no bag and so said yes as bins in China are often unburdened by a bag. He didn't, he meant literally no bottom, and so we looked on as a man with a Masters in Science from a University called Cambridge, knowingly dropped his litter onto the floor and looked surprised that this was the outcome.

Through no fault of his own he topped this by some margin an hour later when a toll bridge barrier closed right on top of his head. He didn't die and we made it to Wuwei, where we are definitely very, very foreign. Today we've not just had the stares and friendly hellos, we've had our first gasps!

I should mention that today Tom and Jonny became real cyclists and we hammered 100km with a slight head wind in about five hours. I'm a very proud mother of two.